J. FENIMORE COOPER. 175 I modestly, because the wifeless, childless man had a number of children [nine nieces] to whom he was as a father. don't know what sort of memorial will be raised to him in his own country . . . but he was in our service as well as theirs. I would like to hear of some memorial raised by English writers and friends of letters, in affectionate remembrance of the dear and good Washington Irving." more. We pass to brief consideration of a less gentle, but on the whole a greater, power. Irving's fame has, for some time, been unduly eclipsed; that of the greatest, with one exception, of American novelists, J. FENIMORE COOPER, has seldom been sufficiently recognised. In their portraits you can read the differences of their characters: they had genius in common, industry and honesty, and good descent, but little That Irving made no enemies seems to me his weak point that Cooper made too many was, if not his fault, at least his misfortune, for he was involved in frequent lawsuits, and nearly in duels. He was born in 1789, and after his education at Yale, from 1802-1805, served for six years as a midshipman in the navy, gathering experience of which he made ample use. In 1821 he published his first important book, The Spy, a patriotic novel; followed by Lionel Lincoln, composed in the same spirit. The Pioneers came in 1823, with a vivid presentation of the scenery of the author's early life, and established his place as a new actor on a crowded stage. Then followed the Pilot, in which he first asserted his claims to an empire, his own among novelists, that of the sea; and, somewhat later, The Last of the Mohicans, and the Prairie, in which, with some echoes from Scott, he made good a similar sway over the hills and valleys of the remoter West. In the course of a tour abroad he wrote his Red Rover, and the Bravo, a tale of Venice, which contains some of his most vivid descriptions, as that of the Regatta,-and flung on the aspersers of his country The American in Europe. On his return he issued his Homeward Bound, a satirical assault on newspaper editors and other delinquents; that led him into several actions for libel, in which he claims to have been almost uniformly successful. The Pathfinder, 1840, and the Deerslayer, 1841,-the latter perhaps the best of the "Leather Stocking" series,-complete the list of his great novels; unless we add the Satanstoe, a vigorous exposition and denunciation of a set of men who had become rioters and martyrs in defence of a communistic theory, that tenants were to hold lands and pay no rent for them-a theory and practice, among a sensible and law-abiding people, promptly crushed. It is impossible in the case of Cooper, as of Irving, to do him any justice by quotations, for his genius is panoramic rather than dioramic: we must sit out a whole scene, or even act, to realise the power of the dramatist. There is, moreover, a certain severity in his style, which restricts the range of his readers. He often wastes words on circumstance, is exhaustive where he might have been suggestive; and his plots -a remark that does not apply to the Red Rover, where from first to last there is not a dull page-are apt to drag; and he has carried too far the practice of trotting out a single character, and making us accompany him-as Trollope and even Thackeray are apt to do-through the lives of his men and women, from the cradle to the grave. Lowell animadverts on this, perhaps over severely : "He has drawn you one character, though, that is new, Cooper's imagination was even more decidedly kindled by the study of Sir Walter Scott than that of Irving by the study of Addison, and his themes, though far removed in J. FENIMORE COOPER. 177 space, are many of them similar in character. As in the works of the Scotch novelist, the semi-barbarous feudal spirit is represented in conflict with modern law; in those of the Transatlantic romancer the enterprise of New England is struggling with the ruggedness of nature and a savage life. The fierce and generous Highland chiefs, lairds, caterans, and thieves of the one are the equivalents of the noble redskins in the other. But Cooper is nevertheless an American to the core : he needs no slang or affectation to establish his originality, but moves in his own path, with something like disdain of comment. His best descriptions, as that of the prairie on fire, of the Ariel among the shoals, of the capture of the whale and the panther in The Pioneers, and of the last sea-fight, after the Red Rover suddenly shows his colours, are unsurpassed, and often thrilling. Cooper's ships are grander if not truer than Marryat's: they move over the seas, in calm and tempest, like things of life. He is not concerned with the grog and biscuit" of the crews, but with the great designs and fiery passions of the captains or the high-souled pirates, who, like Byron's Conrad and Lara, enlist our reluctant sympathies. His hunters-remnants of a race exploded by the railway and telegraph-traverse the great wilds of grass and wood and water with a sense of possession. His best characters are few, but Natty Bumpo, Bob Yarn, Nightingale, the Rover, Long Tom Coffin, Hetty Hunter, and Maud Merideth, are undying creations. As for the author, we like him, as we like Savage Landor, because he was free and fierce and strong. 66 Of minor writers of romance, belonging to the first half of the century, in the West, there is a plethora. Cartloads of Tales and Sketches, evincing various degrees of talent, alive or dead or moribund, are heaped on the shelves of the libraries. A mere catalogue, with a statement of their subjects, would occupy half a chapter. Of the imaginative works devoted to half-historic revivals of the past, the most successful is the N Letters from Palmyra, otherwise known as Zenobia, published, in 1836, by the highly-accomplished Unitarian clergyman, William Ware. This work, which in point of interest and life-like restoration of classic times, is only surpassed by Landor's Pericles and Aspasia, was followed by Letters from Rome, or Probus, a sequel to Zenobia, giving an account of the persecutions under Aurelian, and, in 1841, by Julian, or Scenes in Judea. These lose less in freshness than many continuations, but the writer's fame rests most securely on his first essay. Of fictions bearing on American society, the novels of W. G. Simms, whose fertile brain is said to have produced fifty volumes in twenty years, are worthy of note; but his vigorous work is marred by haste and the glaringly one-sided view which makes the author draw all his gentlemen from the south, all his clowns from the north, of Mason and Dixon's line. J. K. Paulding, Irving's associate, deserves a distinct place as a delineator of character, for his vivid pictures of early colonial life in The Dutchman's Fireside and Westward Ho! where the features of the contest between the new settlers and the aborigines are brought before us in clear relief, in a humorous atmosphere. His apologue of Bull and Jonathan, and the thirteen good farms over which they squabbled, founded on Swift's Tale of a Tub, presents us, in a satire which lies on the border of irony and a rougher form of wit, with an early American view of the relations between his own and the mother country. To the highest rank in this class belongs Longfellow's Kavanagh, a perfect prose idyll of a schoolhouse in the West. His Hyperion is a beautiful blending of romance, description, and criticism. The most poetical, though not the most powerful, outcome of American travel, it has about it the indefinable fascination of the older time which is nearer the youth of the world. The Rhine runs through its pure pages, as by the Lore-Ley Rock, before the scream of the iron horse had LONGFELLOW'S "HYPERION." 179 banished the Fay. The Alps overshadow it, with the yet untrodden Jungfrau snows, before Interlachen, nestling by the margin of the Aar, had its quietudes shaken by the clatter of innumerable tongues; and the Righi was only beginning to be vulgarised. The book is a pan of the "exulting and abounding river," scarce second to Childe Harold in the transfiguring light thrown over its "thousand battles ;" and over the legends, from that of the Christ of Andernach to that of Stolzenfells and Liebenstein, brought back to us as ghosts from the tomb. As a story it exceeds in discussions, which, although the medium of always appreciative and often subtle estimates, as that of Jean Paul Richter and the Minnesingers, want the dramatic element. The sentimental passages, as those of Bulwer's Pilgrims on the Rhine, however relieved by humour, may provoke the sneers of an age like ours, intolerant of sentiment, and willing in its place to endure buffoonery; and there are frequent remarks that appear commonplaces now, when the originality of the last generation has got into the air we breathe; but the work as a whole is lovable, as all from the author's hand. While Ehrenbreitstein flashes in the morning, and the ruins of Heidelberg glow in the evening, light, "as long as splashing boat oar" ruffles the breast of the German stream, the images of Paul Fleming and Mary Ashburton will float on its surface, like swan and shadow. America superabounds in didactic fiction, novels, or stories written with a purpose; the most famous of which, Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom, with the works of Judd and Holmes, we reserve for later review. Among minor works worthy of note are The Bee Hunter, and other narratives of the South-west, by T. B. Thorpe of Baton Rouge; John Neal's Rachel Dyer and Ruth Elder; Mrs. E. O. Smith's Indian Reminiscences; The Linwoods, a picture of New England village life, and Hope Leslie, a protest on behalf of the virtuous poor, by Miss Sedgwick, |